The UNM CFA Dean’s Office and Department of Art are pleased to announce that Armando de la Torre has been awarded the UNM SOMA Summer Travel Grant. This grant is awarded to a UNM graduate student to attend SOMA Summer 2026 @somamexico, a 4-week program in Mexico City....
Welcome Our New Art Education Faculty, Rachel Zollinger
We’re excited to welcome Rachel Zollinger to our faculty this Fall as our newest professor in Art Education.
Rachel Zollinger is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and scholar whose research explores multispecies and emplaced pedagogies at the intersection of science, environmental, and art education. Her work investigates diverse ways of inhabiting and knowing the world through creative practice, bringing together drawing, mixed-media sculpture, digital media, site-specific installation, socioecological performance, writing, and teaching. Inspired by the relationships between people and place, rocks, roots, rivers, grasses, and lichens are among her recurring aesthetic and methodological influences.
Rachel earned her PhD in Art and Visual Culture Education, with a minor in Science Education, from the University of Arizona, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Sierra Nevada College, and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of New Mexico. She has worked extensively in community spaces, museums, and other informal learning environments, developing arts integration curricula and environmental education programming.
In addition to her creative and teaching practice, Rachel serves as an editor for the International Journal for Education Through Art, an associate editor for the interdisciplinary plant studies journal Plant Perspectives, and is a co-founder of Submergence Collective, an art and ecology research group.
Please join us in welcoming Rachel Zollinger to the Department of Art. We look forward to what she will bring to our Art Education program and to our students.
Recent MFA Graduate, Fen Root, Selected for SOMA Summer 2026 in Mexico City
The UNM CFA Dean’s Office and Department of Art are pleased to announce that fen root has been awarded the UNM SOMA Summer Travel Grant.
Art MFA Graduate daniela del mar Awarded Dedalus Foundation Fellowship
The Department of Art is proud to announce that recent MFA graduate daniela del mar is the recipient of a 2026 Dedalus Foundation Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture.


